Here are a few perennial vegetables that I have been growing the past couple of years. We have some of these, and more plants, for sale at the Derryduff nursery. I will be away from next week until the end of July but if you are interested in plants contact me through the comments. Perennials have the advantage of not having to be sown from seed each year, so you don’t have to dig and prepare soil and weed so much, which means some of them are producing quite early in the season while you are still struggling to get your annual sprouts started. Although some are vulnerable to slugs in the first year, most are more resistant to slug damage than many annual veg once they are established. Most of these below I have established in forest garden situations, around or between fruit and nut trees. They have the disadvantage that they take at least a couple of years or maybe more before they produce much.
Siberian Purslane- claytonia sibirica excellent perennial salad, beet-flavoured leaves, grows to about 8-12”high and wide, semi-evergreen in mild areas, ready to eat very early, from late February onwards; shade tolerant. Tasty!
This is a new one for me, only in its second year so I have not been eating from it yet. Growing here on a sandy bank through a ground cover of creeping raspberry Rubus “Betty Ashburner”. It seems to have been blown over by the wind or possibly knocked over by hares the little divils.
Good king Henry Chenopodium bonus-henricus -Perennial greens, can be eaten cooked like spinach (too bitter raw); Good ground-cover, happy in some shade under trees. This is a native wild edible, uncommon though- I’ve never seen it in the wild.
One of my favorites, Turkish Rocket Bunias orientalis is very easy to grow, highly productive tough perennial, grows 80cms high and 30-40cms wide; produces abundance of small broccolli heads from March, followed by edible flowers; quite a strong pepper-flavour, and the leaves are far too bitter to eat raw, maybe cooked they are ok but I don’t bother. I had a good few meals of this in the spring and then cut some of them back hard; they are now producing another set of heads. The strong flavour is not for everyone but I love them and this is a really hardy plant that can easily hold its own against weeds once established. Essential for the forest garden.
Pokeweed- phytolacca americana- a known wild edible from North America, this plant provides asparagus-like spears edible up to about 2ft- the plant itself will grow 6ft or more. Highly recommended by Martin Crawford of the Agroforestry Research Trust he warns in his book Creating a Forest Garden how to cook it:
The shoots are toxic when raw and must be prepared properly. Place in cold water, bring to the boil, then discard the water and replace with new boiling water and boil for 10minutes. The cooked shoots are delicious- like a larger version of asparagus- great with butter or a sauce.
I have a patch of pokeweed now in its second year, and tried my first shoots a couple of weeks ago- I found them very nice and tender. Much easier to grow than asparagus, productive and shade tolerant, and the extra hassle of boiling twice is no bother really- highly recommended.
Not really a vegetable, more a herb, Sweet Cicely Myrrhis odorata is worth growing as an ornamental for its show of white snowy flowers in the spring, aniseed flavored leaves- used for sweetening acid fruits and rhubarb- and crunchy seeds which are ready now like an aniseed sweet. The roots are also edible apparently. Seems very happy even in deep shade. Lovely! Grows to about 2-3ft high and over a foot wide.
In the forest garden. Chives and Turkish rocket in flower in the foreground beneath apple trees.
Finally, couldn’t resist posting up this picture of one of the hares I share the land with, right outside the backdoor!
Hi Graham
Nice to see a post documenting what you are up to. I must admit to being frustrated by your blog in recent times but will certainly be reading the virtuous corruption and hockey stick illusion books! I was at first very defensive of the environmental beliefs i hold and had little desire to read anything that you were writing about. My views are still the same yet my openness to question them is definitely changing.
My thoughts are on how you could make this blog more appealing to the main environmentalist movement so as to help them question there views and make sure what they are working for is properly backed up with proper research.
What i am particulary interested in is your lifestyle and how it has changed in relation to your changing views.
How are you managing your land and the crops you sell and what is your thinking behind forests gardens. I am presuming as you are selling these plants you are still advocating it’s use. Where does this fit in with the pro GE and industrial agriculture and how do they work together?
Perhaps mentioning what you would keep from your old views and lifestyle mixed in with your new views / lifestyle would be a more inspirational read and give people like myself a more open mind when it comes to questioning these ideas. You touched briefly on this regarding asking where permaculture fits in re:all watched over by machines’
Hi Kevin thaks for your comment, and for sticking with z5 thus far! I’m not quite sure what you are asking for, maybe I can address the issues you raise in future posts. Briefly for now, I haven’t changed my lifestyle. It is highly unlikely I will ever get the chance to grow GE crops myself (although I would certainly be interested in doing so.) Nor is there any likelihood that there will be in our lifetimes GE Turkish rocket or even GE lettuce – GE is simply not a technology for the small home gardener because of the costs of developing new seeds- although much of that is just the costs of getting through punitive restrictions and legal requirements imposed under pressure from the anti-GE lobby. GE is primarily a technology for the main food crops of the world- rice, wheat, maize. They are looking at GE blight-free potatoes, and i would certainly like to see that available to grow, but actually I dont really bother with growing potatoes myself anyway. This is an important point though because many people think that if they drop their opposition to GE even a fraction all our seeds for ordinary vegetables will be terminator-types that we have to buy from Monsanto. This is nonsense, it will never happen. I am mainly concerned about GE for Africa; Europe is well enough fed- because of technology in farming- so does not see the need for GE; however, any farmers are beginning to realize that their productivity could be improved with GE in some cases and are beginning to call for its use here- they are rightly concerned about being left behind by the rest of the world. So I think we will see increasing pressure from farmers to permit its use here. (I also think that the only way out of the recession is through new technology and innovation; GE is potentially a very powerful one so we are shooting ourselves in the foot to ban it.) So being pro-GE- or more specifically being “anti-anti-GE” has no bearing AT ALL on my own lifestyle or what I am interested in growing in my own garden. Nor have I any expectation of being self-sufficient in food (=poverty). I grow food because I like to, it adds variety and interest to my diet, it arguably saves me a few quid and certainly makes sense to grow fruit and fresh greens at home if you live in the country. But of course the vast majority of people do not have land or live in the country, so I do not advocate my lifestyle for people in general. There are lots of good reasons to garden even without growing food- social, educational, community, being in nature, healthy exercise etc.. It is a productive and useful hobby. I resist any paternalistic views on other people’s lifestyles or telling other people how they should live. Permaculture has lots of good practical useful things to offer, and I continue to offer them to those interested. It should not have an ideology underpinning it. I am only “pro industrial agriculture” because I don’t want to be a peasant farmer, and those who oppose it also don’t want to be peasant farmers, and it is hypocritical to say, other people (dark-skinned poor people in Africa and elsewhere) should remain peasant farmers because “our western way of life is unsustainable”. We all need industrial agriculture, otherwise we would be living on the edge of hunger, as far to many people in the world still are. Hope that helps, and I will return to some of these issues no doubt in the future.